Does my sales page suck or is it my navigation?

Google Analytics is a great tool, the amount of information you can draw out of it is nearly endless. In fact there is so much information that the average person could easily be lost in the deep well that is Google Analytics. What sets the good apart from the great is not knowing how to get information out of Google Analytics, there are hundreds of tutorials on generating every report you could dream of. What separates the good from the great when it comes to any type of analytics is being able to look at the same data everyone else sees, and drawing meaningful, valuable conclusions from that data. The good look at a website and say “your conversion rate stinks”, the great can tell you why your conversion rate stinks.

Want to figure out where the problem is without having to set up conversion funnels and goals, and then wait to lose more sales? The following method is one I’ve used to determine where to spend my efforts with the data that is already available. It all starts with Google Analytics, or whatever analytics platform you have in place. You’ll most likely have seen something like this.

With the visitor flow interface, and some clever math skills you will be able to have a good idea of where to spend your energies.

Follow these steps to figure out where the problem is on your website:

Step 1: Establish a Baseline- Find a time period where your website was doing well. When you were getting a load of conversions or leads. Record the number of people who did not bounce from your front page & the number of people that made it from your home page to your sales page. Take the second number & divide it by the first number. This will be your baseline this will be “healthy” visitor flow. Look at your sales page during this time, record the number of conversions you had & the number of people who visited that page. Take the first number & divide it by second number. This will be your “healthy” baseline for your sales page.

Step 2:Get real time numbers- Perform the same calculations in real time, using the same time period as before. So if you measured a good week or a good month, use the current month or week. You should now have four percentages one good navigation number, one current navigation number, one good sales conversion number, and one current sales conversion number.

Step 3:Diagnose- Compare your sets of numbers. Is the navigation now worse than what it was then? what about your conversions? The great thing about percentages is that they account for more or less traffic overall. Where is the problem.

Step 4:Treat- Now build a strategy that addresses the problem area.

What do you think? What problems do you look for in a website when you first begin to optimize for conversions? If you’ve found the problem, but don’t know how to fix it, or if you just need help optimizing your site feel free to contact me.